Yet that is precisely what turned up during excavations in Cashel, Co. Tipperary, in 1999, when contractors broke ground for a new library adjacent to Friar Street and archaeologists moved in ahead of them.

The dig revealed the basal remains of Cashel's medieval town wall, constructed around 1265, running north to south across the site. Beneath the wall's inner face, the ground had been built up over a substantial ditch that had been deliberately backfilled at some earlier point. Pottery recovered from that fill dated to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, consistent with the material having been deposited during the backfilling process itself. Partial human remains were found at the base of the ditch, and their presence quietly complicates what might otherwise seem a straightforward piece of civic infrastructure. The nearby St John's Cathedral, which occupies the site of an earlier medieval church, may offer a clue. The road immediately south of the cathedral, Feehan's Road, follows a gentle curve as it passes the building, and when that curve is read alongside the low ridge on which the cathedral sits, the geometry begins to suggest an ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of boundary that religious communities in medieval Ireland commonly defined with a ditch and bank arrangement. If that interpretation holds, then the town wall was not simply built on top of an old civic earthwork; it may have been built over the edge of a much older sacred space. The human burial, however partial, fits that reading rather well.